Problem upgrading an offline computer

[MR ZenWiz]

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 4:32 PM, Goh Lip <g.lip at gmx.com> wrote:
:
>
> means that you need to disable your other non-official repository packages
> first, that is
> o all ppa repositories
> o all other manually installed packages... dpkg -i xxxx.deb
>

I run several unofficial packages, most that I get direct from the
producer, like LibreOffice, Adobe Flash and a few others, and I have
never had to remove those packages just to update the OS.  That seems
like a *huge* flaw in the whole package management system.

I don't use PPAs other than the official repositories, but I would be
very surprised if there isn't some way to set them up to be
subordinate to the official ones, or somehow set them aside so they
can be ignored during an update.

E.g., under RH/rpm distros, yum has a plugin for setting repository
priorities so that the base/primary repositories (i.e., for
updates/upgrades) get priority over others and can therefore be used
to update the system regardless of what is in the ancillary
repositories that may be enabled.